TOKYO – CEO of Polyphony Digital Kazunori Yamauchi released many new details about Gran Turismo 5 at a press briefing on Thursday.
Courses from older games have been rebuilt and redesigned for the fifth installment in the popular series, so fans can look forward to seeing Laguna Seca, Trial Mountain, and Circuit de la Sarthe recreated for the PlayStation 3 when Sony launches the game on November 2.
Newly revealed cars include the Volkswagen Kübelwagen and the Volkswagen Schimmwagen, both designed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche. Also new is the Volkswagen Samba Bus, one of Yamauchi's personal favorite cars, and the Isuzu 4200R, a mid-shift concept car that was first announced at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1989 and designed by top engineers from Nissan, Volvo, and GM. Introduced last was the "GT by Citroën R," with an exterior designed by Citroën and an interior designed by Polyphony Digital.
Yamauchi went into great detail regarding the new community functions Gran Turismo 5 has to offer, with a revamped social networking function called My Home.
With My Home, players can access message boards, game logs, emails, edit their profiles, enter My Lounge and schedule races, trade photo albums, custom course data, send cars and tracks as gifts and utilize friend hopping tabs for easy navigation. My Home is also integrated with "Gran Turismo Anywhere," a function that allows Gran Turismo to be accessed from the internet using a web browser. The web version of My Home on gran-turismo.com will launch on November 22.
Through this networked interface, a VSpec Director's Mode can be executed from a web browser on the internet to play Remote Races with a friend. As long as a player's PS3 is in remote mode, the game can be accessed and played from anywhere. Yamauchi explained that Gran Turismo Anywhere is an attempt to bridge the browser and console game industry, which are currently two completely separate areas. Whether these Remote Races possess the speed and on-demand qualities to equal casual browser games is yet to be seen.
There are new Special Events modes in Gran Turismo 5, including go-kart races, the AMG Mercedes-Benz driving school, The Stig challenge, a Jeff Gordon NASCAR school, a Sebastian Loeb Rally Challenge, and Gran Turismo Rally.
Rally Mode features randomly-generated tracks, where players race through multiple stages and receive a cumulative score as in a real-life rally race. Online, rally mode can be expanded to include more than just two players. During the races, an announcer's voice will call out the curves of the tracks, but they can also be viewed on the mini-map in the center of the screen.
Yamauchi also went into detail about the Dynamic Weather System, which calculates weather conditions using temperature, humidity, and pressure variables that all fluctuate behind the scenes. Surface conditions also change at will, and nothing more than forecasts can be used to prepare for races. Sometimes it will rain just a little bit, or fog will set in. Yamauchi says this adds to the realism and challenge of racing, and is something even he still has trouble dealing with. Even in custom track mode, all a player can do is set weather tendencies, making for a truly unpredictable system.
A video of Project X1 Prototype was also released, a virtual car designed by Polyphony and Red Bull Racing. It as born of the question: "What would a racing car, freed of all technical regulations, look like?" With this vehicle, the Suzuki circuit record was shortened by twenty seconds. Unfortunately, Sony was not generous enough to show a full, complete picture of the vehicle in their trailer video.
Engine sound has been improved from Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, but surprisingly, the game does not run at 60 frames per second at all times. In certain conditions, Yamauchi admitted, when heavy technical effects pile up on one another the frame rate will drop a bit. For example, in a race when there are fifteen cars kicking up dust in front of the player, the game may experience some skipping. That sounds like a fairly common condition for players to be in, however, so I'm curious to see how players take to this unsatisfactory blip in what seems to be an otherwise flawlessly realistic racing game.
Yamauchi finished the event with a hopeful smile. "The game's complexity is reaching Apollo project scale, but we're almost ready."
Image courtesy Sony
